On the recordJanuary 24, 2011
I am ecstatic about the President's choice of Jeff Immelt, the CEO of GE, to be the chair of the Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. We can probably remove a lot of the struggle that occurs on this House floor by listening to the business minds out there, who will advise us about the strength we can provide to create jobs through invention and innovation. Here is a voice that's highly respected; he is tremendously strong in his beliefs in American manufacturing again. And so we must let those voices speak and resonate in this discussion, in this dialogue on where we go and how we build our economy. The President made it very clear: he spent his first couple of years stopping the bleeding of the recession. We were losing 750,000 to 800,000 jobs a month, 8.2 million jobs lost to this economy. Now our assignment is to plan strategically the growth of jobs, what is sustainable. What is sustainable? Manufacturing, because it incorporates from the trades people over to the Ph.Ds. Everyone has a shot at that economy. It's the muscle we need, it's the American know-how, it's the American intellect.
